It's That Time of Year Again
Well I went ahead once more and signed up:
Come November (next week!!!) I've committed myself to tapping out 1667 words of a novel each and every day for 30 days. Yikes!
It's been a while since I've done a serious chunk of writing and the ideas are flying around in my brain. Using NaNoWriMo as the impetus (cough*excuse*cough) to generate an actual draft of something might be fun.
Then again, in the two years I've done NaNo I've discovered that, for me, the difference between actually constructing something that works vs. nothing more than a series of gags is an outline. Not just a general sense of what I want to do, but something with enough detail so I actually know where it starts and where it ends. I've found that if I have those two things I can dance around all day getting from one to the other.
So here's the plan: My current WIP, 40,000 words strong, is on the back burner, per NaNo rules. If I get around to outlining one of my three main ideas THIS WEEKEND, that's the novel I'll do. If not, I'll do a series of essays on the ridiculousness of life, call them chapters, title it "WTF", self-pub it and sell it to my patients, many of whom bought my first two books and have been asking when my next will be available.
(Here are the three ideas, btw. Feel free to offer feedback, though if my muse doesn't listen to me I have no idea why she'd listen to you:)
- "The Phlebotomist": FP whose life falls apart and decides to chuck it all. She throws some clothes and stuff in her car and leaves her life behind, starting over in a small town where she gets a job drawing blood, living simply, hand to mouth. Since she's still a doc even though she doesn't admit it, she's very good and gets offered a job at a local FP group practice, where she falls for the widowed senior partner. They end up together in an O. Henry ending. (Theme: triumphing over materialism.)
- "Gunner" (hate the title; needs a better one): Two medical students, one a clean-cut, hunky blond Ivy Leaguer; the other a biker dude in all his full tattoo'd, bearded, stringy-haired glory. One brilliant, understanding, using his strength to protect and nurture; the other the ultimate horse's ass; bright enough only to steal from others and blame his own failings on them. Guess which is which. Told in first person from the POV of others they deal with as they go through med school. (Theme: not judging a book by its cover.)
- (no title) Allegory of 9/11 and the Iraq war, an alternate/future history casting the US in the role of Iraq as an intolerant nation (taken over with "Christian Nation" rhetoric) governed by a psychotic demagogue, and the Chinese in the role of the US as the sole global superpower dependent on the US for its food (vs. oil.) Russian terrorists attack China 9/11-style; China blames the US, invades in a pre-emptive war, finds and executes the psychotic demagogue, but ends up inciting civil war. (Only problem with this one is that I can't figure out an ending.)